Abstract : This article examines some of the
various myths about the present New World Order
of neoliberal globalization and shows that, in
fact, the differences between the members of the
Transnational Elite that administer it are only
tactical
and never strategic, i.e. they never refer to
the very strategic aims of these elites to
reproduce and expand their transnational
political and economic power. As such, these
differences are non-antagonistic and they have
very little resemblance, if any, to the
intra-imperialist differences mentioned in
Marxist literature. This is a basic qualitative
difference between the pre-globalization World
Order based on nation-states and the New World
Order that emerged in the era of globalization.

A basic
characteristic of the present globalization era is
the multiple confusion about the meaning and
significance of the New World Order (NWO) and the
role played today by the main power centers within
it.
In the context of this confusion, which is often
deliberate, one may hear various myths about the
present World Order that we shall examine briefly.
Thus for some, what we face today is a conflict
between the “goodies” and the “baddies,” where the
former are represented in geopolitical terms by
“Europe” and the latter by “America.” For others,
the conflict is between two main power centers, a
political-military one (USA) and an economic one
(Germany). Finally, for others still, what we face
is “many capitalisms” which are increasingly
un-coordinated in the globalization era, raising,
albeit implicitly, the issue of the need for a
global governance. Clearly, therefore, the above
confusions and corresponding myths play an important
role in understanding today’s reality and in
deciding what to do about it.

The popular conception of the NWO is in terms of a
conspiracy theory, according to which secretive
power elites, usually defined in ideological, if not
religious or ethnic terms, or, sometimes in
geopolitical or crude economic terms, rule the
world. However, in all these cases, the NWO is not
interpreted in terms of systemic structures and the
historical changes in them but, always, in terms of
conspiracies by some elites. Yet, one may see,
instead, the present NWO as the product of
historical changes ― for over two hundred years now
― to the prevailing system of the capitalist market
economy and the associated long-term changes in
political structures. Roughly speaking, we may
distinguish between the liberal phase of this system
in the 19th century, followed by the
statist phase in the last century that was
generalized in the West in the form of social
democracy, after an unsuccessful attempt for
globalization at the beginning of the 20th
century, and the present neoliberal phase which was
associated with the advent and mass expansion of
Transnational Corporations since the 1980s.[1]
Furthermore, as this crucial socio-economic
development coincided (not by accident!) with
another epoch-making development, the collapse of
USSR and the soviet bloc, the NWO could well be
defined in terms of these two systemic developments,
rather than of conspiracies. This does not of course
mean that there are no conspiracies in History.
Elites have always been conspiring but it is only
when the appropriate subjective and objective
conditions have been created that such conspiracies
can lead to historical changes, as the outcome,
always, of the social struggle.

In this
context, the Transnational Elite (TE) consists of a
network of interconnected transnational elites,
which
are mainly based in the G7 countries and control
each major field of social life (economic,
political, ideological and so on).
In this sense, the TE
plays the role that the national government used to
play in the pre-globalization era, when governments
had the function of expressing the general interest
of the national elites, to which the specific
interests of these elites had to submit. Similarly,
in the present globalization era, the TE has the
function of expressing the general interest of the
elites controlling all forms of transnational power
(economic, political, ideological, cultural e.tc.)
to which the specific transnational interests had to
submit, for the sake of the general interest of the
New World Order. One may therefore argue that the TE
is simply a new kind of informal (for now) global
governance.

It is an elite, because its members possess a
dominant position within society as a result of
their economic, political or broader social power.
And it is a transnationalelite,
because its members, unlike the national elites, see
that the best way to secure their privileged
position in society is not by ensuring the
reproduction of any real or imagined nation-state
but, instead, by securing the worldwide reproduction
of the capitalist market economy system integrated
into the NWO. In other words, this elite draws its
power (economic, political or generally social
power) by operating at the transnational level ― a
fact which implies that it does not express, solely
or even primarily, the interests of any particular
state, even if this has a hegemonic position with
regard to the control of a crucial transnational
power, as is the case with the USA and military
power. This is mainly because the transnational
economic power, which in a capitalist market economy
system is the dominant form of transnational power,
is spread among thousands of transnational
corporations (TNCs), out of which 1,318 core companies,
through interlocking ownerships, own 80% of global
revenues and, of these, 147 companies (i.e. less
than 1 per cent of the network) form a “super
entity,” controlling 40 per cent of the wealth of
the entire network![2]
This is why it is meaningless, if not deliberately
disorienting, to talk of economic power in terms of
what part of the global output a country produces,
when it is TNCs which take the important economic
decisions (what, how and for whom to produce) and
not the host country, which usually may exercise
very little, if any, control over them, as it
happens with the BRICS countries!

The
political complement of neoliberal globalization is
representative “democracy,” which in the NWO takes
the form of a “parliamentary junta,” i.e. a hybrid
between representative democracy and a junta (in the
sense of a committee that leads or governs). A
parliamentary junta consists of a political party or
parties elected to government through some sort of
electoral and parliamentary process ― a process that
has very little to do with the electoral process
involved in the parliamentary democracies of the
past, where mass political parties with clearly
distinct electoral programs were competing for the
vote of an electorate that participated in the
process en masse. Therefore, the TE sees its
interests in terms of international “spaces”
(markets, political and military institutions,
media, etc.) rather than “national” ones, although
the emergence of transnational forms of political
and economic power does not imply the abolition of
national forms. States are still needed for the
local institutionalization and enforcement of
transnational strategies and policies, which any
country integrated into the NWO of neoliberal
globalization, has to implement.

As the TE
sees its interests in terms of transnational rather
than “national” spaces, it is not based on any
single state but rather it is a decentered apparatus
of rule with no territorial center of power. This
means that the transnational elite members are not
necessarily based on a superpower like the USA,
although of course they do not hesitate to utilize
the power of a particular state to achieve its aims
― even more so when this state happens to be today’s
leading military power. In this sense, the paleo-Marxist
approach that still sees USA as an “empire,” albeit
a declining one, is obsolete, as it is based on the
outdated notion of the concentration of political
and economic power at the state level. However, the
transnational elite is not defined geographically
and consists of members having a dominant position
within the “world community,” as a result of their
transnational economic, political or broader social
power, rather than as a result of holding power in
any single nation state.

From this
viewpoint, it is indicative that even when
enlightened Marxist analysts (i.e. those who, unlike
obsolete Marxists, have understood the significance
of globalization as a new systemic phenomenon) use
the term “empire,” they usually give it a meaning
that closely corresponds to the meaning of the
transnational elite, as defined above. Thus, Hardt &
Negri[3]
see the “Empire” as “a decentered and
deterritorialising apparatus of rule” (although
they do not include in it the NGOs and the UN!).[4]
Also, in a more recent study, Anthony Mustacich (who
uses the term “trilateral imperialism” to refer to
US, EU and Japan), stresses that “the neo-liberal
empire of today is not the empire of one imperialist
nation, but the empire of transnational
corporations, based in the Triad, and enforced
through U.S. and NATO military force.”[5]

Naturally,
as in the case of a national ruling elite
represented by the government of a nation-state,
when political differences between members of such
an elite are far from rare, the same applies with
the members of the TE. Yet, such differences,
exactly as in the case of national ruling elites,
are tactical, never strategic, i.e. they never refer
to the very strategic aims of these elites to
reproduce and expand their transnational political
and economic power. The national government was
supposed to play exactly this role: to accommodate
the tactical differences between its members so that
the strategic aims are not jeopardized. So, the
silly arguments, put forward for instance by the
liberal globalists in the Russian elite in favor of
exploiting the differences between members of the TE
(see e.g. their divisions with respect to invasion
of Iraq) simply cannot grasp the fact that these are
tactical differences, never strategic ― they all
agree on the primary aim to reproduce and expand
further the NWO of neoliberal globalization. In this
context, Russia is an enemy for all parts of the TE,
although there are obvious tactical differences
between them on how to integrate Russia into the NWO,
whether through economic warfare, or, as some would
argue, through war itself.

Therefore,
the non-antagonistic nature of the tactical
differences between members of the TE implies that
they have very little resemblance, if any, to the
intra-imperialist differences mentioned in Marxist
literature. This is a basic qualitative difference
between the pre-globalization World Order based on
nation-states and the New World Order that emerged
in the era of globalization. An indicative example
is the recent case when the leading country in the
TE, the US, fined a French multinational, BNP
Paribas $9bn for helping countries like Cuba and
Iran to avoid sanctions. This forced even Michel
Sapin, the French finance minister, to call for a
“rebalancing” of the currencies used for global
payments (at the moment the US dollar is the main
world reserve currency accounting for about 85% of
global transactions) stressing that the BNP Paribas
case should “make us realize the necessity of using
a variety of currencies.”[6]
The implication was obvious: EU countries should use
also Euros as a reserve currency ― an obvious
torpedo to the hegemony of US dollar as a reserve
currency, an arrangement which allows US to adopt
policies that non-reserve countries cannot follow.
Yet, within hours of the above statement members of
the transnational economic elite (mainly bankers)
“restored order,” as the following extract from the
same Financial Times report made clear:

“Despite
efforts to diversify, many central banks say
that they still see no real alternative to the
safety and liquidity of the US Treasury market,
and hold more than 60 per cent of their reserves
in dollars. A senior French official cast doubt
on the government’s ability to stimulate the
further use of the euro in international trade:
“In the end it is hard to know what they can
really do. The market really decides these
things.”[7]

Yet, some
politicians and obsolete Marxists attempt even today
to dismiss an analysis like the above on
globalization and the Transnational Elite, either
with reference to a supposed conflict between
“Europe” and the US, or alternatively to the
existence of two main imperialisms, or even ‘many’
capitalisms.

Thus, Gorbachev, for instance, had no qualms about
stating (when celebrating ― next to Merkel ― the
unification of Germany), that “Europe can have a
very positive impact on the situation. After all, it
must become the locomotive in the creation of the
new world.”[8]
In other words, for Gorbachev and the globalist part
of the Russian elite, there is nothing wrong with
the EU and there is, in fact, no need for a new
world pole expressing the need for a new democratic
world order based on sovereign nations, like the one
expressed by the Eurasian Union. Presumably, it is
only the neocon Americans who have to be blamed, and
Russia (with or without the other members of the
Eurasian Union) could well live together in the same
unipolar world defined by the NWO and run by the TE,
of which the EU is an integral part!

For others, the present situation could be described
in terms of two imperialisms or two power centres, a
military one, i.e. USA, and an economic one, a
Germany-controlled EU, which somehow collaborate to
rule the world. Thus, for Petras,

“While President Bush and Clinton were heralding
a “new world order,” based on unipolar military
supremacy, Germany advanced its new imperial
order by exercising its political and economic
levers. Each of the two power centres, Germany
and the US, shared the common quest of rapidly
incorporating the new capitalist regimes into
their regional organizations ― the European
Union (EU) and NATO ― and extending their reach
globally”.[9]

However, the fact that in this analysis the NWO is
defined in purely geopolitical terms, as if we still
live in the pre-globalization era of nation states
and imperialisms based on them, inevitably leads to
ignoring the role of US and German TNCs in forming
the backbone of the respective collaboration of USA
and Germany respectively, within the TE. It is clear
that although there may be some tactical divisions
between USA and Germany on several issues, including
the issue of how best to integrate Russia into the
NWO, there is full agreement between them on the
strategic aim of reproducing and expanding the
present order all over the world, by integrating any
countries resisting the crucial elements of
neoliberal globalization, i.e. the opening and
liberalization of markets for capital and
commodities (and to some extent of labor as well).
This, necessarily, implies, as I tried to show in
the past,[10]
the loss of economic and national sovereignty and
the creation of a new kind of transnational
sovereignty, controlled, at the economic level, by
the TNCs.

Finally, for
others still, the problem is the existence of a
variety of capitalisms in the globalization era:

The
“American century” is over, and we have entered
a period in which multiple centres of global
capitalism have been forming. In the US, Europe,
China and maybe Latin America, too, capitalist
systems have developed with specific twists: the
US stands for neoliberal capitalism, Europe for
what remains of the welfare state, China for
authoritarian capitalism, Latin America for
populist capitalism. After the attempt by the US
to impose itself as the sole superpower – the
universal policeman – failed, there is now the
need to establish the rules of interaction
between these local centres as regards their
conflicting interests.[11]

On the basis
of this description (which was not based on any kind
of analysis), Žižek
concluded that the
“principal contradiction” of the New World Order is
the impossibility of creating a global political
order that would correspond to the global capitalist
economy. Yet, Simon Peres, the recently
retired arch-Zionist president of Israel,
has already given an answer on how a kind of global
governance can be created out of this seemingly
disorder. Thus, Peres
celebrated as follows globalization in front of a
highly enthusiastic audience of the entire European
Parliament:

Globalization put an end to racism. It empowers
the individual. Global companies do not impose
their will upon people. On the contrary, they
respect the will of their clients. They can
provide scientific know-how for growth. They can
assist young people to acquire high education.
To create jobs befitting their skills.[12]

Then, following Gideon
Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the
Financial Times, who in a well-known 2008
article entitled “And now for a world government”[13]
provided the ideological background for global
governance (which many commentators have cited as
proof of an elitist plot for its establishment)
Peres went on to describe how the future world based
on globalization should be. Namely, the same New
World Order as at present, plus an informal global
governance:

“Our
global world has no global government. It has
become almost ungovernable. We have to look for
an alternative. I believe the future ways of
governing shall rely on three pillars: National
governments will continue to be in charge of the
husbandry of the national state. Global
companies will invest in research and
development. And the individual will enjoy the
capacity to govern themselves by knowing the way
their brain functions. Science today is more
telling than politics. It is universal and
borderless. Armies cannot conquer wisdom. Police
cannot arrest science. (…) Facing the lack of
global governance, we can foster close
cooperation between governments and global
companies. Facing the dangers that threaten the
values for which we stand, we shall fight terror
wherever it is, relentlessly”.[14]

So, in
almost identical words with the ones used later by
Žižek
to describe the “principal contradiction” (who
simply added a supposedly Marxist slant to Peres’
argument), Peres has also shown the way out of this
contradiction in terms of course of the present NWO!

Yet, there
is, in fact, a real alternative to this, as I
described it elsewhere:

“Therefore, the fundamental aim of the social
struggle today should be a complete break with
the present NWO and the building of a new
democratic order in which economic and national
sovereignty have been restored, so that peoples
could then fight for the ideal society, as they
see it (…) In this sense, the completion of a
Eurasian Union, as originally designed, (i.e. as
an economic union of sovereign states having the
ability to impose whatever social controls on
markets they decide), would have been an event
of a tremendous global significance for the
development of a new democratic global order to
replace the present NWO of neoliberal
globalization, which has already destroyed the
lives of billions of people all over the world.[15]